Meandering musings on Altiumís bold and exciting move to Shanghai

I must admit that when I first saw the announcement that the folks at Altium were planning to transfer their HQ from Sydney, Australia, to Shanghai, China, I checked the date to make sure it wasn't April 1.

I must admit that when I first saw the announcement that the folks at Altium were planning to transfer their HQ from Sydney, Australia, to Shanghai, China (Click Here to see that article), I checked the date to make sure it wasn’t April 1.

When I realized that this wasn’t an April Fools’ joke, my next reaction was “What? Are they serious? What would prompt them to make such a move?” So I decided to investigate a little more, and I had a chat with the folks at Altium, and I must admit that now I’ve had the time to mull things over I’ve come to the conclusion that this is really a very bold and exciting move.

Of course, when you look back on the history of Altium, you quickly come to realize that “Bold and Exciting” is what they do best. Let’s cast our minds deep into the mists of time … way back in the early 1980s when we find a guy called Nick Martin (Altium’s CEO and CTO) living "Down Under" on the island of Tasmania (which is actually an Australian state and is known to many as "The Jewel of the South").

Nick required access to tools to design printed circuit boards, but such tools were jolly expensive at the time, so he designed his own. In 1985, Nick formed Protel, which subsequently became one of the major players in affordable, off-the-shelf PCB design tools.

Of particular interest with regard to the current move is that this isn’t the first time Nick has taken such a step. In the 1990s, Nick moved the Protel operation to Silicon Valley, because that’s where he felt it needed to be. Later, he moved everything back to Sydney, because he felt that was the best move at the time.

In 2001 they adopted the name Altium; truth-to-tell I'm not sure why they changed their name, but I’m guessing that it was because Protel was primarily associated with PCBs and they wished to branch out into other areas, starting with PCB-FPGA co-design, and now all sorts of stuff like Cloud-based computing.

Companies do tend to move portions of their operation around on occasion, but my personal experience has been that those who don the undergarments of authority and stride the corridors of power tend to ensure that it’s someone else lower down the organizational chart that actually does the moving.

Not in this case. Altium is planning to transfer its entire core software development activities, corporate office, and executive management team to its existing sales and support office in Shanghai. From the perspective of existing users in America, Asia, and Europe it will be “business as usual.” Similarly, nothing really changes from the perspective of users in Australia, because the Sydney office will remain as a local sales and support center.

The reason for this move is that China is emerging as a major player in the electronics market, it has the local technical resources required to support the core engineering team, and the folks at Altium feel that it is important for them to have a real presence in China and to become truly part of the Chinese electronics design community.

It seems that the guys and gals at Altium have been considering the economic landscape and the opportunity landscape for some time, and – based on their deliberations – they say that China represents the best location and opportunity for the execution of their plans for the development of the market for tools, methodologies, and systems that will help customers transform their businesses from product-based models to a service-based approach, where web-based ecosystems enable direct relationships between device end-users and device manufacturers.

In some ways this might be seen as a follow-on from Altium’s acquisition of Morfik in November 2010. At that time, Altium explained that its objective was to help electronics designers expand their role from designing the electronics in devices to the larger role of designing and engineering web-based ‘device ecosystems’. These ecosystems will consist of the actual electronic devices, connected via the Internet, along with cloud-based software applications that run on this platform. A more recent (and more detailed) exposition of this philosophy was presented in the article The real role of EDA in the Cloud.

Personally, I have to say that I am very impressed. It takes a lot of guts to undertake something like this. We often hear of EDA companies doing things like “opening a research center” in other countries, but this is the first time I recall a company like Altium making a move as big and bold as this.

The bottom line is that the management team at Altium are very much “thought leaders” who have the courage of their convictions and who tend to act on their vision. They took the lead in changing from a tool-chain type environment to a platform design environment; then they became “The EDA company that bought the Web company”; and now they are poised to take China by storm. I wish them all the best, and I look forward to seeing many more surprises from them in the future.

@David: "...so Altium no longer works..."
Funnily enough, I was visiting a local company a couple of days ago chatting to an engineer who does hardware and software on small wireless network boards -- he does the board design using Altium and he seems to be real happy with it...

"failure to simulate" happened after an upgrade. Prior to the upgrade (about 1998/9/whatever) a whole anlog-digital circuit simulated exactly as the pcb version, but the later system failed...horrible...massive talk on the phone...and my work stopped for about a year in that area, until I got Multisim. The same horrible thing happened with the A word (CAD) when a key 3D design couldn't be even opened by the "upgrade" and the upgrade couldn't make it again and it destroyed any file saved after it was openened by the "upgrade"...shit happens.
So the "shit happens" saying might apply to Altium? Let's see.
My betting is that the Chinese want the IP and they'll improve it hugely, then do it better, so the old IP will be worthless.

Multisim saved me from a financial-career disaster caused by a combination of the P word (re failure to simulate in 1998) and the A word re failure to do 3D CAD approx the same time, together, for about eighteen months.
Multisim works wonderfully. It simulates well mixing analog and digital; and if it fails it has an automatic system of doing in a few minutes what I used to spend days at trying the options.
Altium had the most horrific mess of manuals and "help" of from my experience, whereas Multisim almost never needs support. In a way I'm glad that Altium yesterday, decided after all that because I haven't paid for another year, the version I have is defunct and an attempt to downgrade fails, after 1GB or so of downloads, to get the last 4MB file....so Altium no longer works. I've seen a few blogs now, and believe that Altium is defunct. I hope the last of the remaining people at least help me to get the version that worked going again that worked a month ago.

I have been using National Instruments' MultiSim for a couple months and I love it. I have not laid out a board yet, but the SPICE and schematics are great. They have been constantly improving and are way better than when I looked at them 5 years ago. Being bought by sugar daddy National Instruments must have helped infuse cash to make some cool things in MultiSim. National Instruments is in Texas and Multisim is out of Canada, neither of which is part of America, but they are both a darn sight better than Red China.

The best thing Altium has done is having competitors that shoot themselves in the foot. Cadence sent the Orcad codebase to India and release 10 was a disaster, more crashy than Protel ever was. Then, after recovering from that fiasco, they toss out the OrCAD layout program (Massteck) and force people to get a stripper Allegro they call OrCAD Editor. Allegro is great, once you get a 4-year degree in computer science and cut your pay in half so you can be a 24/7 layout person instead of a creative engineer that does occasional PCB design. Mentor Graphics never loved PADS, and never will. Instead, they dumped Boardstation and tried to migrate everybody to Expedition, another heavy-iron "enterprise class" package where you need two or three departments doing maintenance, library creation, and updates. Altium supposedly got a lot of customers who felt it was easier to jump to mid-range Altium rather than having to go through that whole "enterprise" experience.
Altium has great adoption rates in China, unfortunately, nobody pays for it. I am sure Altium hopes its presence in China will get the government thinking about enforcing IP. They do get cheaper engineers, but those costs are rising, and there is the code theft problem someone mentioned. I am sure that part of Altium's love of "client-server" is that they can hide the whole program from any one engineer. That is probably why they felt they could just leave Australia.
One person hit on my feelings. My grandparents came to America to escape the communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe. I am not too keen on supporting a dictatorship. It may not be evident now, but China is turning into a real enemy. They are snapping up the lithium in Chile and making exclusive partnerships all over South America. They just limited export of any noble metals used for high-performance magnets. Hope you don't use Hall effect detectors. They stayed the same but the stupid magnet just got 10 times more expensive.

Altium has been quite entertaining over the years.
There was Protel, a crash monster so unstable in 1998, a buddy gave me his paid-for copy and went back to Orcad. Then there was the 10-year period when Altium became the elephant graveyard for CAD tools. Tango, PCAD, and I think a few others. When we hardware people gave the software weenies so darn much memory the memory leaks didn't crash the machine, Altium actually stayed up for more than an hour. They started hitting their stride about 10 years ago. They do library creation and maintenance better than OrCAD ever dreamed of. They seemed to understand that the schematic and PCB are really the same information. Symbols and wires in the schematic are footprints and traces in the PCB. And they put in a big button to synchronize the two. A few years ago they did 3-D which I thought was too whizzy, but buddies tell me that they have caught mistakes with it that would have otherwise cost a board spin. Like Orcad going off on PLD design back at Version 7, Altium had to tangent off on FPGA design a few years ago. The upside is that now they actually design the FPGA demo boards so there is actually someone on the property that uses the program. It has gotten a lot better due to that.

I could not disagree more. Nothing is more frustrating then moving between different packages for different functions. In addition, the functions of most of these different packages are highly intertwined and most are based on the same underlying principles (netlists). So you enjoy exporting a netlist from Capture to Allegro, then to PSpice, then? Every function performed in Altium is well implemented. Plus, the walls between software and hardware are coming down and Altium is in my opinion well prepared to deal with this transition. Plus, you are hardly handcuffed to Altium - you can easily export to numerous other platforms if that is your thing. If you hate integrated environments, then you are going to have slim pickings for EDA tools - just check out the blogs at the major software companies and you will find this is the direction the industry is heading.

"Unified Design Platforms" don't work. They inevitably end up linking good tools with bad -- usually in a way that is hard to work around.
Face it, NOBODY makes good tools for all situations.
On the China front -- you may see China as a new and exciting market. I see it as a land of spammers and totalitarian government. I'm sure this will change -- eventually -- but until then, I'm not allowing my browser to talk to any company sited in China.

Thank you for being a Protel customer and I hope I can shed some light on the situation. Altium is acting upon its vision of a unified design platform (replacing tool chains), connected device design (IDC forecasts 15B devices by 2015) and cloud utilization (check out Amazon web services and our recent acquisition of Morfik). These actions/strategies are in tune with technology trends. So Altium Designer will be much different than Protel. Give Altium Designer 10 a try - I think you will like it.

I know that my company has a lot of problems regarding hiring and consequent attrition of engineers in Shanghai. Luckily we've been able to deal with this without sacrificing quality. But I admit that highly rotating engineering job market is great for the engineers, bad for the product quality. I've heard the average increase in pay in Shanghai per year is about 20%!!!! So I don't know how Altium is going to deal with this.